Stephenson's Rocket

a more elegant SteamOS, for a more civilized age. Support for more hardware, including obsolete GPUs and RAID

The Artist Formerly Known As Ye Olde SteamOSe

SteamOS is now shipping, in beta form at least, and it's all cool and stuff.

Valve have now integrated most of the improvements from Ye Olde SteamOSe, such as BIOS and DVD support, into their installer. You can download it from here.

Stephenson's Rocket replaces the Ye Olde SteamOSe project by building back on Valve's installer with bug fixes and improvements - especially hardware support.

This kind of collaborative development demonstrates the power of Open Source - and remember, you can contribute to Stephenson's Rocket too! Click "View on GitHub" at the top of the screen to get started, and watch the development tutorial video linked below!

How to install?

Latest release: 2.49plus1 (released 2015-11-10)

Installing from a DVD

Just burn the ISO to a blank DVD from your favourite tool, and boot it.

Installing from USB (Mac)

Open a Terminal window from the Utilities section of Applications.

Type "diskutil list" to get a list of devices - one of them will be your USB stick (e.g. /dev/disk2). Follow the Linux instructions below, with this /dev/rdiskX entry instead of /dev/sdX (please note the added "r"!)

Installing from USB (Linux)

As root (e.g. use "sudo") run "dd bs=1M if=/path/to/rocket.iso of=/dev/sdX" - sdX should be the USB stick device (check "dmesg" immediately after plugging it in, you should see the device. Be sure to use sdX, not sdX1 or sdX2. Then boot into the stick.

Installing from USB (Windows)

Download Win32 Disk Imager and use it to copy the .iso to your USB stick (1GB minimum size).

Once the installer is up...

Pick the "Automatic Install" option to wipe the first hard disk in your system and install SteamOS to it.

For more sophisticated booting - e.g. dual-boot or custom partition sizes - select the "Expert" option. Use of this mode is documented in the support video above.

Beyond that, just follow Valve's instructions from their site - Stephenson's Rocket should behave exactly like the real SteamOS, except it works on more systems

Known issues

3D support is broken in Big Picture Mode itself and in 32-bit games in VirtualBox. This is a flaw in the VirtualBox guest drivers.

How can I help?

Test it and report back to #steamos on Freenode.

Or support me by donating - Donate via PayPal, Steam, or Amazon. Donations will be used to help with testing - wifi adapters, hard disks, graphics cards, etc.

Version History

2.49plus1

Sync to release-day Brewmaster

2.26plus1

First Brewmaster-based release

Updated Mesa to 10.6 with statically-compiled libstdc++, which works around problems with Mesa on Brewmaster

159plus1

Refreshed to SteamOS update 159

153plus2

Fix NVIDIA detection bug where only cards supported by both the legacy AND current driver (e.g. 600-series) would allow installation. There is now no blocker at all on NVIDIA cards (e.g. cards not supported by either driver will not block installation, they will simply fail)